You’ve worked with Hindustani musician Neela Bhagwat to translate more than fifty poems of various women Bhakti poets. How did this project come to be?
The project began in a gym we share in Mahim. That day the gym’s music system had failed and I was on the treadmill and so was Neela Bhagwat and she began to sing a Muktabai composition: Mungi udaali aakashi, teene gilile suryaanshi (An ant flew into the sky and swallowed the sun). I told Neela that I wanted to read it in translation. She said there wasn’t any and that there were many Marathi women Bhakti poets who had not been translated. I said, “You should choose fifty or sixty of these and we should translate them together.” I forget how many times I have made this offer and how many times people have never come back. But Neela Bhagwat was different; in a week or two, she was at my door with her choices.
What is the relevance of such poems today? The modern reader has not experienced or lived through an era of Bhakti.
No poem is ever relevant or irrelevant on its own. It only becomes relevant or irrelevant when there is a reader. You may pick up a book and start reading and think, ‘No, this one is not for me’ and set it down again. Another person may pick up the same book and find herself sucked into the book and unable to put it down until she has finished reading. It is the same book but in each case, it has become a completely different book.
It must be challenging to revive these women’s poetry in the 21st century. Could you please elaborate?
I would not dare to say that I am reviving these women’s works. They are part of a national consciousness; their abhanga are still sung in hundreds of households every day. I have only translated some because they are so beautiful and because I wanted to, I needed to.